Replicate the Dynamics CRM security model to SharePoint: Updated

Where do you find the most valuable business data? How do people work with that data? Within integrated systems is the where. Securely should be the how. Especially these days with GDPR requirements about to go into effect. But what happens when there’s a persistent security issue when integrating the Dynamics CRM security model with SharePoint?

In this post, you’ll see the best way to ensure the security of your Dynamics 365 (CRM) data in SharePoint. By automatically replicating the Dynamics security model to SharePoint. In turn, you can build the powerful, fully integrated business asset that people actually want to work with, and is highly secure.

Dynamics CRM and SharePoint, better together

There are various reasons why many public sector entities, private and third sector organizations, choose Microsoft services for their CRM and document management needs. Here’s two you’re likely familiar with.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 (CRM) provides a sophisticated security model. By employing role privileges at multiple levels, such as records and tasks, it ensures data security, enabling access control on a precise, granular level across your organization.

SharePoint 2016, (Online as part of Office365, or on-premises versions), on the other hand, is the solution of choice for team collaboration, document storage. Compared to Dynamics CRM, it provides many important benefits, such as lower database utilization, cheaper online storage, and access to documents for non-CRM users. The latter can provide significant cost savings in licensing and CRM data storage, as we’ve already wrote here.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 (on-premises CRM) standard out-of-the-box integration with SharePoint enables organizations to link SharePoint documents with CRM records. Moreover, users can manage SharePoint documents and utilize many of the document management features of SharePoint directly in the user interface of Dynamics 365.

However, the security models of Dynamics 365 and SharePoint differ significantly. Therefore, this standard integration does not provide the same level of record / document security in CRM and SharePoint. This results in documents in SharePoint being accessible to users without the required Dynamics CRM privileges.

Alternative solutions to sync the security model from CRM to SharePoint

Currently we offer the only out-of-the-box solution on the market to replicate the Dynamics CRM security model to SharePoint. Custom solutions require coding and constant administration. Our solution is customizable and extendable. You can even test it in your environment free for 30 days. With the SaaS variant, you could have the solution running in minutes.

When your employees advance through various roles within a company or governmental organization, their access to information changes. A simple example: An employee is promoted, her access rights have expanded after becoming a member of a new team in Dynamics. Automatically, our solution will make the team-related documents in SharePoint accessible to her – no admin work required.

Similarly, when your company grows and opens new divisions in other countries, in Microsoft Dynamics CRM you can create individual business units or teams for the corresponding markets.

Thanks to multi-tenancy capabilities, by deploying a single installation of our solution you can configure the replication process for multiple Dynamics CRM instances. Moreover, the CB Replicator also supports multiple SharePoint site collections for a single Dynamics CRM organization.

Ensuring GDPR requirements

In addition, the European Global Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR) which is relevant to organizations worldwide, clearly regulates access rights to personal data, and the transparency of access rights. CB Replicator helps to ensure and to prove that the same access rights are applied to extracted documents on SharePoint as to the original CRM users.

SharePoint permissions & automated user mapping

There are many resources explaining SharePoint permissions, SharePoint security groups and so on, such as in this detailed guide (beware it’s long but goes deep); so I won’t get into it now. If you’re interested in this solution, you’re surely already familiar with the basics of SharePoint permissions.

More importantly, however, to speed up deployment and administrative tasks, the service provides an automated algorithm to match (map) between users in Dynamics CRM and SharePoint. The algorithm uses login name to match users, Thus, it’s important that linked Dynamics CRM and SharePoint are connected to the same Active Directory domain or Office365 organization.

Moreover, the service automatically creates dedicated permission levels in the target SharePoint. And, the application has preconfigured mapping between Dynamics CRM and SharePoint suitable for most deployments.

3 key benefits of CRM SharePoint integration

Ensures same documents are accessible to appropriate users in both environments at all times.

Ask us about the technical details!

A few months ago, we offered some insight in an external post on Medium. I won’t duplicate here 😊). That post features a few technically-oriented topics related to our solution. These include how we handle:

SharePoint group limit (10.000 groups);

Maximum number of unique security scopes for a list (50.000 security scopes);